She was a straight-A student. Book nerd. No drugs. No shady friends. No deviant behavior—that I knew of. Private school. Affluent town with a keen neighborhood watch. No one saw a thing. Kidnapping didn’t fit the profile. I wanted to be glad for that…but my daughter was still missing. It had been too long. A mother can’t help but slip into worst-case scenarios as the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months tick by.

It didn’t make sense for a girl from a loving home to just up and leave. But it often happened, Detective Montgomery gently reminded me. So here we were, 184 days post-disappearance, with no clues as to where she had gone, or with whom, or why. The detective had searched every angle, interviewed every close friend, but sometimes there simply was no explanation for why an ambitious honor roll student from a good family decides to disappear. But as the detective told me again and again as the months dragged on, everyone is hiding something. Even my perfect fifteen-year-old daughter.

Pulling open the desk drawer, I didn’t expect to find anything new. The police had been through it at least once, and me a dozen times. With eight bedrooms and over 9,000 square feet in our home—dubbed the Execution Estate, after the horror that marred this house forever—endless hiding places and secrets lurked behind these walls and haunted every room. But every day I hoped, prayed that maybe, just maybe, we had missed something that would lead me to Vera. Something I hadn’t noticed before. Something with hidden meaning.

Beneath pages of scribbled notes, Vera’s women’s suffrage report remained unfinished. I picked up the same art notebook I had leafed through countless times. The pages were jammed front and back with original drawings displaying real talent and growing artistic maturity. Mostly manga-inspired cartoons, elves, with the occasional self-portrait or sketch of our imposing Victorian home, which always seemed to be just one coat of paint away from being declared Oakmont’s unofficial haunted house.